


Better the devil you date…

by Whim_Wham



Category: Teen Titans (Animated Series)
Genre: Alcohol, Classical References, Cuddling & Snuggling, Epiphanies, Evil Plans, F/M, Falling In Love, Films, Immortality, Kittens, Latin, Libraries, Lingerie, MST3K References, Magic, Magical Artifacts, Meeting the Parents, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Nudity, Pre-Quest, Prophecy, Relationship Advice, Relationship(s), Sexual Humor, Sexual Tension, Single Parents, Teen Romance, Transformers: The Movie (1986), Translation, canon ships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-12
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-13 08:00:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 10,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5701015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whim_Wham/pseuds/Whim_Wham
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gar & Rei-Rei fall in love, and go on a big-Q, slightly non-canonical quest! Mayhem, madness, mothers, merriment and kittens ensue!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ravening Beastboy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dating between the emotionally spastic and purposefully autistic is going to be so much fun!

On the threshold of the tower's den, Beast Boy paused: something wasn’t right. His eyes surveyed the room and its inhabitants. Nearly everything and everybody looked and acted as they had countless times before : Starfire was in the kitchen fueling her alien dietary requirements with mustard and mold ; Cyborg battled Robin in the algorithmic arena of Carpocalypse Racers, and Raven was reading one of her dusty, musty, fusty old tomes of Things Best Not Known By the Minds of Teens. Only she wasn’t really reading: she was watching. The book was a hunter’s blind, and Garfield was her quarry. Gar found the implications unsettling.

Besides Robin, Raven was the single most focused person that he knew. When she read, she did so with the single mindedness of a black hole inexorably devouring local space-time. Now, however, as Beast Boy stood on the verge of the room, his eyes beheld a different type of Raven, a distracted Raven. 

Raven’s eyes had skittered over him from over the top of the big book and then back in an alarmingly unsubtle attempt to be subtle. Raven was never subtle : she was the dark princess of the Barbed Remark ; as such, there should have been some wry greeting or blistering glare. That day was not today. Today, she continued to silently peeked at Garfield from behind a volume that she only pretended to read ; it was the spookiest Raven of all time. 

‘Okay, the Hell princess isn’t any spookier than usual, Gar. Hello! Hell Princess!’ He thought, stepping into the room with all of the calm that he could muster. 

Robin and Cyborg weren’t so absorbed in their game to not notice the herky-jerky entrance of their teammate. Cyborg nudged Robin, whispered, “What’s up with Gar?”

Robin took his eyes off of the digital battlefield to consider Garfield. His opponent smirked as he took advantage; vaulted the enemy car into the oblivion of off track space. Robin directed his second best Batman glare at the cyborg before returning his attention to Beast Boy. 

Gar was definitely acting oddly : He walked into the room with the exaggerated composure of an amateurish actor. Something was making him uncomfortable in a place where he should be nothing but a relaxed green teen. Robin widened his search; identified the cause: Raven.

He leant over to Cyborg: “Raven’s spying him; it’s freaking him out.”

Bent over his controller, Cyborg muttered, “It’s about time.”

Robin gave him a sidelong glance as his automotive avatar sideswiped his opponent’s T-Car into a time consuming end-over-end fireball crash.

“That he freaked?”

“Dude! Gar’s a nonstop freak-out.” 

Robin nodded knowingly as his red and black suspiciously Batmobile-ish car howled across the finish line to fireworks, victory music and bouncy space-bikini fans. 

He did a little touchdown dance; spiked the controller on the sectional couch: shouted, 

“Score!” 

No one but Cyborg paid any attention to Robin’s display: it was standard T-Tower proceedings; however, what followed was a different matter. 

Cyborg, not being able to help himself, quipped: “That’s what Raven’s thinking about!” Immediately, he wished he had not blurted, his hands flying up as if to cram the already escaped words back into his big mouth.

Surprised at her discovery , a shocked and blushing Raven sat bolt upright ; the book and several other items in the room were caught up in a burst of her wild dark energy. The book, pages splayed, took startled flight; the television, uncertain which way to escape, split down the middle and tried for two directions at once; all of Robin’s belted smoke bombs gave up their swirling ghosts in an abrupt fog bank; Cyborg’s detachable drone hand fired out of the smoke to crash through the den’s picture window; smoke shrouded Gar made a noise that could only be described as a surprised squawk that abruptly reduced to an equally surprised squeak; and somewhere deep within the kitchen, it sounded as if Starfire was noisily battling the percussion section of the kitchen sink orchestra, and it sounded like the kitchen was loosing.

Regaining emotional control, Raven spoke her three word signature intonation and gestured a twirling hand gesture: the smoke wheeled into a roiling point that vanished with an audible ‘pop!’ to reveal den debris. 

Everything and everyone was a mess. Robin, his utility belt singed, was sprawled across the top of the couch. Cyborg, sitting on the couch, stared at his stump dumbly before shouting, “Give me back my hand!” and stumbling to the shattered picture window to peer with extended optics for his missing appendage. A food covered Starfire flew, literally, out of the kitchen only to stop, jaw dropped, at the scene of devastation before her.

“Are we under attack?” 

Raven turned to her and meant to say something witty in her gothic fashion, but she caught sight of what had befallen Garfield ; she scooped him up and fled.

Starfire, looking very worried, grabbed her significant other by both shoulders. 

“What is going on?”

Robin looked up into the eyes of his alien princess girlfriend—Yes, Robin you’re in Outlanders*—and smiled crookedly: “Raven’s finally into Gar.” He raised his head, took in the mess that was once a den; declared: “Really into him!”

Having once really being into Raven, Star knew exactly, immediately and intimately what had transpired.

She moved her hands to cradle his face as she brought her mouth down to his for a happy kiss.

“Their dating is going to be even more gloriously messy than a G’lorg Snarr on the Apex of Hoop’La!”

Having some idea of the true nutty hullabaloo of Tamarainian culture, Robin could only imagine that it meant messy teen love times ten thousand. He wiped away the strawberry jam and mustard ghost of his boo’s buss as he thought out loud, “Have we G’lorged?”

Star laughed, delightedly ; whispered in his ear.

He did his best Keanu Reeves: “Whoa!”

***************

Garfield regained consciousness within a room that he had only been within one other time: a scary, illuminating, and oddly endearing encounter with the hidden multiple facets of Raven. Three things registered upon his consciousness in rapid succession. He was very small. He was something with a forked tongue that tested the air. Most significantly of all, he was in Raven’s lap! She was looking down at him with an expression that was half avid, half bemused. He squeaked, the tongue lancing out past piranha teeth, and he felt what seemed to the be the unfurling of leathery wings.

'What in the heck am I?' 

As if reading his mind, Raven held up the book that she had been ‘reading’. The cover of the leather bound book bore an embossed design of an intertwined pair of winged lizards. 

“You’re a winged horny dragon.” She coloured immediately as she had meant to say, “Thorny! I meant thorny dragon. Moloch Horridus!” She finished, somewhat lamely and far too scientifically for the extra wide eyed spiky lizard on her lap. What she found embarrassing he found endearing and comforting. The enigmatic and sarcastic Raven could be as fantastically awkward as Garfield. With this realization came the key bit of awareness that had eluded him for so long. Their gawkiness was mutually endearing.

To prove it, he managed to lisp a high pitched, “Wow, you’re as much a spaz as I am!”

She rapped him gently upon the head.

“Ow!” He was currently very spiky.

******************

*The Johji Manabe manga & inspired animé from the 1980s.


	2. Materfamilias Extra Dimensionem

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thus continues the madcap development of what will almost be certainly the love life of one Garfield Mark Logan. 
> 
> I have deviated from canon : in my timeline, Azarath is not magically restored following Trigon's defeat (The End Part 3, Season 4)

“What’s with the modern art?” 

Beast Boy stood on his tip toes to tug at one of a multiplex of flexible antennae projecting from a beachball sized sphere which hung heat-ray like from the den’s ceiling. 

Cyborg rolled his organic eye. “You obviously don’t know a broad band energy sink when you see one, Gar. And stop playing with that!”

Garfield stopped twirling the ceramic tipped metal tentacle into a corkscrew pattern. 

“Is that the scientific name for a disco ball? Awesome!”

Cyborg gave an emphatic final growl of torque to his Robertson tipped screw middle finger as he finished securing the assembly in place. 

“It’s not a disco ball! It’s a….”

Starfire entered the room bearing a enormous bowl of popcorn and a precariously balanced stack of movie discs.

“Friends, I bring snacks and all twenty six seasons of Space Viking Princess Contagion!” She stopped at the sight of the new addition to the den:

“Oh, pretty! What is it?”

Beast Boy effected the cliched Travolta dance pose: “It’s a disco ball, Star!” 

Cyborg grabbed the sides of his head to keep his brains from exploding: “Energy sink, Gar! En-er-gy sink!”

Starfire was far too busy listening to the fun explanation to catch the actual one.

“For dancing? Yay!” 

Koriand'r grabbed Beast Boy and elevated him in a more ballroom than disco maneuver at exactly the moment that Raven glid moodily into the room. Her reaction to the Mary Poppins dance routine, a single, sharp flint of jet formed an exclamation point above her head ; then her envy regarding Star and her disdain for Garfield collapsed into shock as she suddenly felt her released essential energy yanked tidally away from her body. 

Raven’s eponymous spirit bird shrieked into the newly repaired room. The new couch, television and other contents of the den exited the floor to ceiling window. Star yelped as, still airborne, she was separated from a plummeting Gar, to be buffeted out into the bay with the short-lived furniture. Almost as quickly as it formed, the spirit raven distorted into a river of black energy flowing into the brightly illuminated sphere of the energy sink's sphere. Cyborg ran to the machine, opened a panel; threw a switch: nothing happened.

“It won’t shut off! I don’t under...” A scintillating tangle of energy writhed across his metal body; he whirled, writhed in blue lightning, to the floor. 

The current cut abruptly.

Raven collapsed, unconscious.

Garfield shouted her name, ran to her side; touched her.

A brilliant flash of emerald expanded and contracted in an almost subliminal firework, and Beast Boy’s inert body fell across Raven’s supine form. 

*******

Beast Boy woke to the murky view of a vast domed ceiling pierced high above him by an oculus. The mote dancing light that shone down directly upon him pierced the complete darkness that flooded the chamber with a spear of light. He bolted upright, shouting Raven’s name ; it entered the darkness only to be hurled back at him mockingly by unfeeling architecture. Then he was answered.

“Garfield Mark Logan, do not fret: Raven is unharmed.” It was a calm, adult, feminine voice that somehow made Gar think of the of resonant roll of waves on a beach. He would have relaxed except he knew of one other person who used a tightly controlled and unruffled voice.

He hopped off of what appeared to be a dais of black glass ringed by eight statues half seen in the gloom just beyond the column of light.

“How do you know? Who are you, anyway?”

“A mother always knows.” A spark of white light ignited within the darkness, and formed into a white cape and cowled woman hovering in the air. The outfit, the hovering, the bindi and the statement combined within Beast Boy’s brain to blow his mind. 

“But weren’t you… when Azarath was destroyed?” 

The woman lowered her head, her face hidden by the shining cowl. 

“Azarath was not completely destroyed. Enough was saved, it endures. With your help my daughter will recover it.”

Garfield had a flash of Robin level insight: “You know your daughter’s fine because you arranged this meeting!”

The head raised, and her face came back into view with a contrite, knitted brow.

“ There are strict constraints regarding direct familial magical contact : I am restricted to the ephemera of forgotten dreams and enigmatic clues when it comes to contacting my daughter.”

“What’s the rulebook say about friends of family?” 

“Very little.”

Garfield’s eyebrows shot up: “Dude, your magic’s messed up!

The woman’s rueful expression lightened. “It is! Oh, is it ever!”

They shared an odd laugh in the very odd space.

“So, who’d you ‘zap!’ to get me here? Cyborg?

She nodded. “His invention is really a magical device he acquired while under my…direction.”

“You know, the more you talk the more you sound like the kind of people we fight!”

She looked pained: “Raven did not understand the clues that I left behind for her the last time she visited Azarath : the intact city seal, and the fact that her Azarath incantation is still effective.” She sighed. “That is one of the reasons why I brought you here: so I would be able to be direct.”

“There’re others?” 

“One other: A mother is entitled to meet the boy with whom her daughter is,” A playful little curl crept into the smile. “bewitched!”

Beast Boy’s eyes goggled: “Bewitched?!”

Arella raised her hands in appeasement.

“That magic is entirely yours!”

Beast Boy ruffled his left hand through his shock of hair.

“I think you’ve got bewitching mixed up with annoying!”

“There is no difference: her feelings for you cause confusion, and her confusion makes her nettled.”

Both hands pushed back his hair away from his forehead. “You’re telling me that when she bites my head off it’s ‘cause she’s crazy about me?!”

“Precisely!”

“Can we please talk about the other reason why I’m here, please?”


	3. Pneuma Confusion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing is normal when dating a devil. That includes meeting her mother. Parallel dimensions, dream states, cryptic messages and mad science all crowd into a page and a tad of chapter.
> 
> My canon divergence: Azarath is not magically reinstated at the completion of The End.

Hair a wet comet tail, a soaked Koriand’r reentered the den as a shocked Robin rushed into the newly wrecked den. 

“I leave for half a day and…” Then he caught sight of his three insensate team mates. 

“Star, what…?”

She landed in his arms : “Friend Cyborg’s disco ball has trapped Raven…and Cyborg and Beast Boy too?” 

“Disco….” Robin was interrupted as the spirit raven made a second raucous appearance from the sphere to re-emerge with its fountainhead, Raven ; displaced the green gleam that swum out of her body to sink into into Gar's skin.

“Ball?” Robin lamely finished.

Star, who had more first hand knowledge of spirit transpositions than her beau, reacted to the esoteric energies with alien princess aplomb: “Ah, it is a pneuma confusion like I shared with Raven when the Puppet Master attacked. They are coming out of it.” 

Robin wasn’t exactly certain what a ‘pnu-ma’ was but the energy pattern did look like what occurred when the sentient puppet villain robbed the Titans of their vigour, spirit, energy or ‘pnu-ma’. He decided to sidestep the esoteric issue with some good old direct leadership.

“Stay with them Star; I’m going to check Cyborg.” He reached his companion at exactly the moment when the prerecorded ‘Boo-Yah!’ indicated the initiation of a successful Cyborg reboot. 

Face down in Raven's chest, Garfield woke with the comfortable stupor of a cat curled up in a sunbeam, while Raven’s return to consciousness was the other extreme: immediate, crystalline and _most_ displeased at Beast Boy’s bosomy burrowing. 

Fidgeting between Raven's breasts, Gar drooled a pool of saliva into the dent of her sternum. She scowled, raised a fist.

Almost all the way back to consciousness, Garfield murmured five words that transmogrified Raven’s intent: “Corvine, Azarath awaits the Orb!” The descending fist blossomed into a palm that, joined by its partner, lifted Gar’s sleep-gluey eyes level with her own.

“Oh, hi…” He said, thickly. Then, becoming very aware of his intimate arrangement with his team mate, he blurted: “Raven! Wha…?”

There was an intensity within Raven’s dark eyes that steadied Garfield and made him remember his dream in a rush. He bent his head forward; planted a peck on a very startled Raven’s mouth—he had been aiming for her cheek, but missed. 

“That’s from your mom!” 

“She’s alive?” Raven sounded incredulous. 

“Yes.” Garfield stated, factually, even though his proof was only dream-stuff.

“She’s alive?” Raven sounded hopeful.

“Yes!”

“She’s alive?” Raven sounded tearful.

"Yes!" Garfield gathered up his girlfriend in his arms and marvelled as she wept. 

Koriand’r, who had been standing solidly upon the floor, floated gently aloft with her happy response to the scene unfolding before her emerald eyes.


	4. A Raven by any other name

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two couples delve further--separately, but with some slight overlap--into the heady mysteries of love.

Garfield sat on the edge of a corner of Raven’s bed. He had zero choice: there was exactly one chair ; it was occupied, by Raven. That was fine as it was a creepy assortment of unfurled wings and staring eyes whereas the bed was merely the bed of the girl who, according to her extra dimensional mother, really dug him. 

“So the monks of Azarath only knew you by a nickname?”

Raven nodded, leant forward in her scary chair. “I was Corvine. My _Vocamen_ was known only to the abbot and my mother.”

Garfield, fascinated, almost leant off the edge of the bed: “A secret code word?”

Raven nodded.

“My identity was password encrypted directly into the abbey’s crux-stone as a defence against being replaced by a doppelgänger."

“Uh, what’s a dopplewhanger?”

Raven reframed things for the confused teen, suddenly comprehending the role of accommodation in love : she dipped into her growing knowledge of her boyfriend's jumbo scary movie memory.

“Pod people.” 

“Ohhhhh! So it kept Trig….”

She interrupted him by suddenly sitting next to him on the bed.

“Yes.” She leaned in close and planted an awkward, close mouthed kiss on Garfield’s lips. His eyes widened ; blushing furiously, she jerked her her head away.

“I didn’t me…I’m so….”

He pulled her back for an equally amateurish encore which surged into a mutually fierce clutch. It ended with the panting, flushed couple gazing across a very intimate lack of distance into each others shining eyes. By mutual unspoken consent, they broke the clench for a less intense side by side arrangement upon the made bed. He stroked her violet hair; she did the same to his shock of jet: it was the safest, least volcanic activity that either could conceive of as a display of mutual fondness.

Garfield declared, “Now I know what ‘take it slow’ means!” 

Raven agreed with an earnest, “Dude!” 

Gar giggled: “I never thought that I’d hear you say that!”

She cozied up against him; spoke in her more typically undemonstrative manner.

“We’re rubbing off on each other.”

Beast Boy's eyes widened : “Like sex?”

She bopped him upon his noggin.

"Like personalities, _dork_!"

The ‘Thud!’ halfway up the wall one room over interrupted Beast Boy’s mock ‘Ow!’.

“Wow,” Gar goggled, “What are those two doing in there?”

“Probably training.” She experimented with a little physical contact wriggling to wrestle her man’s mind away from other matters. It worked masterfully. He threw an arm around her; drew her in as close as was physically possible while still being fully clothed. 

**********

Flat on his back next to the bed, Robin shot his airborne girlfriend an annoyed gaze.

“Star, are you here with me, or over there with them?”

Koriand’r with an ear to the wall replied with, “I hear nothing! I was sure both would be noisy!” She actually began to look a tad concerned. “Do you suppose that they are maybe not okay?”

Robin’s frown somersaulted into a grin.

“They could making quintuplets in there and still be less noisy than you!”

He could see the future queen in Star's almost subliminal counter gaze before she effortlessly scooped him back up into their aerial make out session. 

“And I think that you have yet to hear me at my loudest, Par’Queeze!” She kissed him loudly, eagerly.

He wasn’t exactly sure what a ‘Par’Queeze’ was: boyfriend, lover, fiancé. He had plenty of time and desire to learn; and the lessons were fantastic!


	5. The Thing Called Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Both couples have a flappable and considerably less flappable participant: I will demonstrate with a little breakfast bungle.

The following morning, one member of either couple was squirming against the need to know what the other pair had been up to the previous evening; their significant others were, according to their personalities, either blithely or sardonically indifferent. Intent upon fishing the facts out of Garfield’s head by the act of stare induced ESP, Starfire missed the mustard and squirted a dollop of ketchup into her morning coffee ; and Gar absently buttered his toast with Raven’s Hefeextrakt* as he tried not to stare too openly at Star. 

Koridand’r sip turned turned into a spray of tomato smelling coffee. Not missing a beat of his breakfast, Robin handed her the intended yellow squeeze tube. Beast Boy bit into what he thought was toast buttered with butter but was actually slathered with Raven’s imported German yeast spread. Gar gagged, and flung the toast. It stuck to the wall, Hefeextrakt side down. 

Both bungled diners assuaged their palates : Star with a usurping dollop of condiment straight into Robin's half finished coffee ; Gar with a hefty dollop of peanut butter spooned across his tongue to erase the taste of potent yeast paste as Raven bit into her black, Hefeextrakt slathered toast.

Garfield looked on in horror : “H’aow ca’ yaou’ ea’ tha?” 

Raven considered her ridiculous beau with a little smile that Starfire, cradling a refill of her new favourite drink, happily noticed was not actually mocking.

“Hefeextrakt tastes as grim as it sounds ; I love it.” 

“Who doesn’t like the taste of grim?” He punctuated his statement with another fresh spoonful of buttered legume across his taste organ. 

Rebooted and rested, Cyborg sauntered into the room, took the empty chair at the table; heaped a tower of flapjacks that he began to drown in butter and syrup.

“You don’t and that’s why I…” She stopped, flustered, as the others interrupted their breakfasting to listen. 

“Why you?” Star’s eyes were even more lustrous than usual.

“Why…” Raven rallied: “Why I…tolerate the lot of you is beyond me!” 

Cyborg cut a perfect wedge out of his pancake stack, stabbed it with his fork ; flourished it with its dribbling foodstuff in time to his declaration : “Mechanically, tolerances are improved by alloying in those elements that improve performance ; relationally, tolerances are improved by…” He popped the piece into his mouth to give dramatic pause. “…love!” He and his pancaked fork concluded, both directly addressing a ruffled Raven.

Laughing, Beast Boy held up his hands in surrender.

“I’ll admit it before we have to rebuild a third time!” He cast a look at Raven that was slightly more jaunty than jittery; she relented, grateful for the rescue from her innate emotional reticence with a nod : Gar marvelled at what he hoped to Azarath was a newfound sophistication regarding his knowledge of his girlfriend. There was only one way to know for sure : he went around to her side of the table, slid an arm around her; she flinched slightly before snaking an arm around him. 

“We’re a thing.” She stammered.

*******************

*A German yeast spread akin to Vegemite & Marmite. It really does taste of sadness, broken dreams and lost puppies.


	6. One of these Things is not like the others...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Movie time in the Tower!

Cyborg didn’t miss a beat: “Seeing that your boyfriend is a shape changer, of course you’re now a Thing!”

Robin snorted laughter and orange juice; Beast Boy tried to look offended before he too was struck down by the giggles.

The space-viking and demi-demon regarded the male tomfoolery with their own characteristic reactions : Star's was wide eyed with wonder ; Raven's was narrow eyed with impatience. 

Star jumped in as the female envoy at a conference where the other side had seemingly lost their collective minds.

“Please, is this a ‘guy thing’?” 

Beast Boy turned into the most grotesque creature in his mental menagerie, a blesmol*, shook off the giggles; trundled over to the entertainment console, and pawed at the controls ; the Universal logo orbited the Earth in three hundred and sixty centimetre 12K glory. He reverted to his usual, angular self, called out, “We have Movie Sign**!”

Raven sat next to him on the couch. 

“This will explain?” She sounded her typical ironic self.

“Everything!” Cyborg took the far end of sectional, leaving the intervening space for the remaining couple, the female member of which interjected, “That is not what the Earth looks like from orbit! It is too…” Robin pulled her in close and whispered, “Pay attention, or you’ll miss the message!”

“Ohhh!” Starfire concentrated on the screen in time to see an erratically flying saucer approach and appear to burn-up in Earth’s atmosphere.

“That is also not what the…”

Everyone shushed her. 

Raven commented on the slow, steady electronic build of musical dread: “I like the score.” 

**********

The camp fire blazed brightly ; the cardiac score throbbed; the screen darkened. 

Mouse Garfield peeked out of Raven’s popcorn that Robin and Cyborg had made partway through the movie. They had needed a reason to leave the room that wasn’t, ‘Can’t stay: too scared!’ The girls, absorbed by the movie, hadn’t even noticed that the boys had left until their grudging return, snack laden, to the chamber of horrors.

Raven declared: “That would be my favourite movie, except zero women!”

Starfire plucked mousy Gar from Raven’s popcorn bag; stoked him between nervously twitching ears.

“There is plenty of ladies, friend Raven! The Thing is a girl super colony!”

“What?” The boys spoke almost as one entity. Rodent Beast Boy was far too busy going slowly cross eyed under Star’s stroking to squeak. 

A laughing Star explained : “A bunch of men discover women and resent it horribly when they end up changed for the better!”

Cyborg shivered. “Staying single forever!”

Robin laughed ruefully. “Alien space princess girlfriend logic!”

Raven’s jaw dropped minutely: “Whoa! Favourite movie of all time!” She reached out to Star. “Now, give me back my mouse! He needs…improving.” 

Laughing, Starfire passed the concerned looking myomorph over to his better half. 

Raven addressed her mousy man as she carried him from the room : “and you thought you were the monster in this relationship! Adorable.” 

Beast Boy managed a very good, high pitched movie-geek reference before vanishing in the clutches of Raven.

“Help meeee!***” 

Starfire considered her boyfriend with inquisitive eyes. 

“What was the message, Par’Queeze?”

“It turned out that it was for me, Star.”

“Yes?” She leant her eyes in close to his.

He whispered in her ear.

“Hooray!” 

She awarded him a canoodle. 

Cyborg, sounding positively puritan, groused, “Gah, wait until there isn’t any one around to scar!” He left, mumbling: “I’m never going to be able to scrub that off of the hard drive!”

************

*Blesmol : A mole rat ala Ron Stoppable's pet in Kim Possible.

** Of course Gar loves MST3K!

*** The original movie, The Fly (1958)


	7. Study Date

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Orbs, tomes, hormones!

A henge of tomes sprouted towers of leather and vellum across the floor of Gar’s room. Within the musty, bookish heart of the henge, Raven paged steadily through the huge, illuminated pages of a book large enough to be its own coffee table. Squished in next to her, Gar puzzled over a tiny tome entitled flashily across its red moroccan leathered cover, _Arcane Resque Gestas Mundi*_. 

“Well, there are only three balls in this book. It’s gotta’ be a Palantír, a Lok'Nar meteor, or…” He flipped forward to the 'V's. “Or this!" He pointed to a beautifully hand inked picture of a luminous blue sphere covered with an elaborate pattern of gold traceries and symbols. " The _Venit Sphram._!”

Raven quirked an eyebrow. “That would be correct if ‘orb’ referred only to perfect spheres: it doesn’t.” She flipped an enormous page.

Beast Boy looked confused. “There are other types of orbs?”

“Four others: a cross surmounted sphere denoting royalty, a celestial body, the ten degree radius around a celestial body, and an eyeball.”

“Ewwww! I hope it isn’t an eye!”

“Probably only a metaphorical name for a amulet and not a real eyeball at all.”

“A what?” 

Raven sighed, marked her place with a velvet book mark; closed the tome; parked a patient kiss on her arcanely artless boo's lips. 

“Real eyeballs are too squishy to make into useful orbs.”

Gar looked vastly relieved: “Good!” The look suddenly withered to worried: “Wait, how’d you know that?”

Raven took his head in her hands, smiled gravely: “Practice! Do you want to see?”

“Nope!” He was pretty sure she was joking. Pretty sure. 

“Aw!” She didn’t sound too put out as she kissed him again. “Now, show me what you’ve found.”

She opened his book to the Lok’Nar entry; she read aloud: “‘…sum of all evils…infests all times, all galaxies, all dimensions….’ doesn’t sound promising.” She turned to the other page; scanned its contents.

“Scrying sounds interesting.” She read more; moued ; shut the book: “It only works somewhere called Halfway Earth or something.” She paged forward to brook her enthusiastic boyfriend, and began to read the entry aloud : "The Venit Sphaeram is a map of what was and what will be : a grave marker for the magic that is lost and for that which will be found again, for good or ill." 

She put the book down ; took her beau's head in both hands, kissed him with a serious attention to detail.

He came out of the smooch with a loopy grin : "I did good?" 

Feeling the euphoric fizz of their sexual chemistry, Raven answered his question with another, longer kiss.

When they both came up for air, Raven looked into the lustrous eyes of her love and breathily said, "We _need_ to find this!" One pale finger stabbed emphatically at the picture of the blue and gold sphere. 

*********  
* Google Latin : Arcane Artefacts of the Universe


	8. Spherical Subterfuge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The search for spheres leads our couple into too much trouble for so few Titans.

The Venit Sphaeram spun slowly atop the cog dais in the centre of a vast chamber of pointlessly ponderous interlocking gears. Garfield and Raven, standing upon the threshold, backlit by the benign sunshine outside of the warehouse, exchanged an alarmed look.

“Slade!” Garfield uttered the name with a venom that made Raven wince. Slade had a way of making even the most optimistic and positive of people bitter. 

The voice, controlled and sardonic, issued seemingly from the orb itself: “I was going to make it more of a mystery, but I did want you to find me.”

Raven cut through the banter: “What do you want with the Lok’Nar, Slade?”

Slade chided her : “Either you are trying to outwit me, or you do not really know what you are looking for : either way, you are a fool.”

“What do you know of my domain, Slade?”

“Have you forgotten that I was an _intimate_ part of it?”

“I can never forget!”

“Of course you can't! I was practically part of the family, and you never forget family. Now impress me, and tell me why you are interested in the Kugelkarte?”

It was Garfield’s turn to laugh: “Dude, you’ve got the wro…” Raven nudged him in the ribs. She whispered: “It’s the German name for the Venit Sphaeram.”

The disembodied voice shifted tone from controlled scorn to the composed entertainment of a big cat.

“You’ve done your research, Raven. Now the only one who doesn’t know what we’re talking about is your simple boyfriend.” 

“Hey!”

Gar’s boyish pique allowed Raven to recover the poise that Slade had purposefully upset. She kissed her boyfriend on his adorable pout.

“He isn’t wrong: you are green.”

Garfield was a bit confused but seeing as a kiss was involved, he rallied with, “Green all over!” He blushed at the implications of his exclamation ; she smiled, much more normally than she was once able to do. 

“If you lovebirds are finished….” Raven did not let Slade finish the insulting statement.

The smile was replaced by a scowl : “Why would I ever enlighten you?”

A squad of Slade-Bots sprang from out of their positions of concealment, formed up into a robotic wedge in between the two Titans and their goal. 

“Beyond letting it slip that what I possess is exactly what you need?” A tone of disappointment entered the placidly unsettling modulations of Slade’s voice. “For all your power, you are still just a guileless teenager.” 

Gar rolled his eyes: “What do you really want, Slade?”

“It speaks.”

Raven came to the defence of her man: “Of course you confuse innocence with stupidity, Slade : you are a psychopath, after all. Now, answer him!”

“I’m keeping it very simple: tell me why you want the Venit Sphaeram, and I will let you walk out of here with it.” The voice was now completely emotionally neutral as if he were an actor reading his lines for the first time. “Or, refuse...”

A familiar black and orange figure rode a cogwheel out of the shadows, and dropped to a fighting crouch in front of his robot formation.

The door behind Raven and Garfield slammed with solid steel resound. 

Slade stood, arms crossed : “And fight a battle you can not hope to win.”

Suddenly and strongly, both Titans regretted not involving the entire team in their relic hunt.

Garfield affected a bold stance, pointing an only slightly trembling finger at Slade.

“Dude, you’re just another Slade-Bot!”

The black armoured arms uncrossed into a fighting stance.

“Am I _really_ , boy? Come and find out for yourself!” 

Altering into a gorilla, Beast Boy advanced to meet him.

Raven shouted her habitual intonation ; englobed her beau in a black ball, whisking him away just as the dual hammer blows of Slade's fists passed through what would have been battered ape. He affected surprise, putting unsteadiness in his unforeseen follow through.

“What?” 

Before stepping into the sphere, herself, Raven glared at a Slade directing his forces towards her. Robots surged towards her.

“I’ll get it from you! If not today…” she stepped into the ebon orb that abruptly vanished with a whoosh of displaced air. 

Alone with his bots, Slade’s combative demeanour dissolved immediately. He strolled over to the slowly rotating Kugelkarte, punched it with a gauntleted fist. 

It exploded into splinters.

“Only if I actually possessed it, foolish girl.”


	9. Wrangle & Row

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first argument, the first welcoming of the first argument ; the first friend-spiracy!

It was their first official spat as boyfriend and girlfriend.

Gar pouted.

“You don’t think I could have taken him?”

Raven did the last thing she should have, but the combination of her boyfriend’s expression and the absurdity of his suggestion made it impossible for her not to : she laughed. Her little Raven voice whispered, ‘No snuggles for you tonight, Ray-Ray!’ 

Garfield glared at her. until now, She had never seen his angry face ; and, until now, wasn’t even sure that he actually possessed one. It was a pretty angry face ; she attempted to soften it with soothing words.

“Robin can barely hold his own against Slade, and his combat master was Ba….” That intensified the glare until it was one spectrum away from heat vision. 

Raven changed tact : “I should have known it was a trap when I noticed that the warehouse wasn’t part of the official storage for the Museum of Cultural Artifacts.” By Raven’s estimate, the glare lost a degree of intensity. “And we _know_ exactly how good Slade is at setting and springing traps! Even the whole team would have been in trouble!” The stare abated a little more ; and then Raven cranked the heat back up to High.

“And there was no need for you to try to impress me.”

Gar had also known just how foolish he’d been in the attempt, but he was too angry at himself to do anything but storm out of Raven’s room. 

“Good, because I’m not impressive at all!” He realized how bad that sounded, but his awkwardness only further fuelled the anger. He slammed the door behind him.

At that moment Raven discovered that she understood and accepted that her boyfriend would be unjustly moody for awhile. She would have to be patient with him, but what was love if _not_ patience? She smiled a remarkably relaxed and happy smile.

Gar would return to her when he was ready : it was how love worked. She fell back across her bed.

“No wonder I’ve never been in love : Love is the complete reverse of emotional control.” 

Items in her room began to poltergeist.

She raised her head and shoulders off the bed, watched the spooky parade troop by briefly before intoning, “Okay, maybe my love isn’t the _complete _reverse.”_ She spoke her words of focus, and the various items obediently floated to their assigned places about the room. Her inner Raven whispered, ‘We haven't even gotten anywhere near full-nookie yet, Ray Ray! What's going to happen when we _do it_ with Greenie : tidal waves, earthquakes and volcanoes?' _

Blushing, Raven attempted to shut her inner voice out with an adorably creepy bout of self-talk : “Shut up! I’m not listening! La la la la la!” 

****

Co-occupying the same dimensional space of a single couch cushion, Starfire and Robin watched a decidedly nineteen fifties movie dinner scene in which an oddly bronzed and big-forehead-ed white haired gentleman was conversing with the very definition of the Square Jawed Man of Science.

Square Jaw: “What do you think of Mr. Mozart, Exeter?”

Exeter: “I’m afraid I don't know the gent... My mind must have been wandering. Your composer, of course.”

Starfire laughing, quipped: “But I’m not an alien!”*

Grumpy Gar stalked through the room, and the movie abruptly became much less engaging for the couple. Robin was about to call out to his friend when Koriand’r stopped him with a gentle, yet insistent silence index finger across his lips. She whispered in his ear, “That is Gaz’zla face : they have had their first fight ; everything will be fine!” 

“Like us on that planet we were stranded on?” 

Star turned her pert little nose up at him, indignantly and loudly huffed : “You were not my _boyfriend_ then, remember?” 

She hopped up off the couch, the removal of her prop caused her significant other, looking emotionally blindsided, to collapse supine onto the couch. 

“What? Star?”

Starfire winked at him, before rushing off to join a Garfield who had been stopped in his tracks by her performance.

“Come friend Garfield : Both of our Par’Queezes are being really _zar’zax_ right now!”

Not exactly certain about either Tamaranean term, Gar decided to act as if he were : “You got that right, Star! Pizza?”

“Pizza!” 

Robin, watching the delectable mechanics of his departing girlfriend, admired her emotional acumen ; missed her physical proximity.

“I bet an _Interocitor_ can fix relationships : they fix _everything_ else. ” He settled in for a solo movie experience of the encroaching madness of planet Metaluna. 

****

There was only one pizza joint in Jump City as far as Gar and Star were concerned : Papa Pizzaz’s Pizza Palace! They had saved it from becoming a giant self-baking pizza oven after a fight with a very fiery felon by the name of _Ablaze**_ ; ever since the owner had happily bestowed free pizzas upon the saviours of his business. These two, alien and shape changer, now enthusiastically tucked into the establishment’s _Teen Tofu Mustard Half Way Supreme_ pie on the patio that overlooked the Jump City skyline.

Star, adding a liberal squirt of tawny condiment to an already mustardy slice, observed her dinner partner with emerald eyes.

“is there _anything_ you wish to discuss, friend Garfield?”

Gar nodded, but took the time to wolf a triangle of cheese and tofu slathered pizza to give himself time to formulate his reply to his friend’s question.

Licking the grease from his jade fingers, he entered into his very first attempt to talk to a girl about _another_ girl : “You’re good friends with Raven, right, Star?”

The green eyes lit, gleefully : “We are the _best_ friends, Gar! We talk about _everything!_

Garfield showed yet another bout of unusually non-spastic emotional acumen : “Including me?”

Starfire grinned, elatedly ; cut to the chase : “ How is the dating of Raven?”

Gar’s face fell.

“Oh, Star, I _completely_ spazzed it hard with her!” He held his head in greasy pizza hands.

The laugh, literally buoyant, floated Koriand’r a foot above her chair, a filament of her pizza slice cheese seemingly tethering her to the table. Gar looked at her through his fingers, a hurt look on his oily face. 

“It’s not a laugh….”

Starfire disagreed with more laughter, this time of a gentler nature : she floated a little closer to her seat : “It is your _spaz_ that she loves!”

Gar’s head was up, hands planted on the tabletop ; he looked at Star with more confusion than hurt : “What does that mean, Star?”

Koriand’r settled back into her seat, took a dainty Tamaranean nibble of pizza—an Earthling chomp—for dramatic pause, chewed reflectively ; swallowed. 

“It means the reason she likes me and _loves_ you, friend Gar, is : we are both so free, emotionally.” 

The bright spark of hope that lit in Garfield’s eyes made Starfire’s heart leap within its bone armoured casing.

She thought : ’He is so lovable, I almost wish to betray a lover and a best friend!’

Star communicated something of her affections for the green teen with a kiss on his very surprised mouth.

“You should go back to her before _I_ steal you away!”

Garfield goggled.

Starfire gave him her very best serious look ; it was still tinged with laughter.

“You are all the adorable! After we finish this most delectable fare, you _will_ save me from the disowning of Robin for _you_!”

Beast Boy nodded, emphatically. 

****

_*Totally a rip…homage to _This Island Earth by way of _MST3K : The Movie___


	10. Bed Intentions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Garfield is only Batman in his mind, not in his actions.

Gar didn’t go straight home from his pizza palaver with Star. Instead, thinking about Korinad’r’s words, he squirrelled about the trees of Jump City Central Park. It was dark when, finished from visiting every tree in the park twice, he crept back into the sleeping silence of the Teen Titan’s Tower. He had a plan. He would speak to Raven in the morning.

Thinking himself completely familiar with the tower, Gar stole through the night shrouded rooms and hallways to his particular bedroom door. He slipped inside with the phantom grace of a Batman, shed his clothes on the way to the bed ; launched himself on a perfect horizontal bed trajectory when Raven’s voice startled a scream out of him.

“I’ve been…” She didn’t get to finish as ballistic Gar landed smack atop the lump of occupied bed. “Oomph!” was the best she could manage. 

“Raven! You’re in…”

“My bed.” She finished, for him. She intoned a spell, and a will-o’the-wisp popped spectral light over the bed to reveal two things : it _was_ Raven’s room, and Gar was _naked_. She yelped, recoiled under the covers.

He squeaked, reflexively turning into the first animal that entered his mind : a kitten. He settled down, not thinking too much about the nature of the soft anatomy upon which he rested ; purred loudly enough to hopefully console his affronted girlfriend. 

Raven peeked out from over the top of her black bedspread, scooped up diminutive Gar-kit ; looked steadily into wide kitty eyes.

“You really thought it was your room?”

Gar gave a very emphatic feline nod and mew. 

“You can stay.” She drew him to a breast that was clad only ever so slightly in glossy, frilly satin chemise. “But,” She smiled, evilly as feline head pressed up against bosom : “only as my grimalkin.”

Garfield’s puss brain had no idea what a grim-mall-can was, but it knew exactly what it was squished up against, and how little next to nothing there was between brain and breast ; he was fine with remaining kittenish. He brushed his fuzzy head contentedly across the smooth body heated surface of the cloth and buzzed the loudest purr a kitten his size could muster. 

****

Raven awoke groggily, remembered something about a warm lump on her chest ; turned over directly into the naked torso of the slumbering Gar. Not all of him was in quite the same state of repose. She flushed at the sight, but did not look away. 

‘My kitten’s all grown up!’ ran inanely through her mind.

She watched him as he slowly came awake : tiny little tremors and mumblings built to a crescendo stretch and accompanying groan as sleep gluey eyes opened, focussed ; bugged out.

His mouth fell open. “Raven?”

She drolly replied, “Yes?”

He said in a very small voice, “Am I naked?”

She somehow retained her sangfroid : “Very.”

He yelped, snapped up the bed sheet, sending bedclothes and Raven flying, tore out of the room, impromptu toga billowing about his skinny green body. 

“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” drifted back through the door that caught the end of the sheet as it closed behind the fleeing Garfield.

“Ahhhh!” filtered through the door as the presumably un-sheeted Beast Boy streaked for the sanctuary of his actual room.

Flat on her back next to the bed, Raven giggled what to anyone else’s ears would sound scary but for her was a sign of nothing more sinister than hilarity : her boy was so adorably gawky, and….She blushed, the red standing out attractively against the glossy black fabric of her chemise.


	11. A Breakfast of Waffles & Euphemism

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A cross species shenanigans breakfast extravaganza!

Logan Garfield not only looked sheepish at breakfast the next morning. He was a sheep. Lamb Gar nibbled ruefully at his tofu waffle analogue while Cyborg regaled the other diners with his tale of woe.

“I do not know where his clothes go when he animals out, but last night he was all Gar and I still don’t know where his clothes went!”

Star’s eyes went big. “He was without the pants?”

“Star, he was without the _anything_!”

Korinad’r blushed prettily, an orange hand coming up to cover her little grin.

Raven leant into her ; whispered in an orange seashell ear ; Korinad’r’s blush deepened. She held her hands twenty centimetres apart, gasped, “That’s two more tan’kles than Dick’s!”

Gar and Robin bleated at exactly the same time : Robin’s was the articulate expression of Beast Boy’s bleat: “Hey, how do you…” He blushed furiously, glaring at Star. 

Star desperately tried to keep a straight face, but she was neither of a species nor a personal temperament much given to pretence ; she blushingly giggled.

Robin gave her his best Batman look : “You peeked while I was sleeping, _Korinad’r_!”

He only called her by her formal name when he was irked at her ; she countered with the ingenuous, “I only wished to know if ,” She flushed, prettily : “you and I could make…” The blush deepened, and she tongue tied, adorably. 

Robin’s expression lost all of its serious Wayne in a rush. He blushed in response to his woman’s avowal, and was on the cusp of acknowledging her when Garfield interrupted in a very Beast Boy fashion.

Gar morphed into his angular green boy home identity, and adopted a loud and very hippy victory dance.

“Who’s got two _tinkles_ over Robin? This guy!”

Starfire, screaming laughter, interjected, “Tan’Klas, Gar!”

Robin, glowered; was about to be all serious, when, observing his joyous girlfriend, he switched abruptly, wisely, to join her jollity. 

Gar added hip thrusts to the dance. “This guy’s got _all_ the Tankle Wankles!”

Eating her waffles, Raven gave her man her patented grimsterical stare.

“And they better be all mine, one day.” She finished, blushing alarmingly.

Cyborg laughed : “Dude, listen to your dame!”

Garfield adroitly added, "I better ; this cat does not want to be neutered!" He popped into kitten mode, pounced his big eyed, purring puff ball accurately into Raven's lap. 

The team collapsed in a wriggling clump of hilarity ; Raven, trying to look dignified, had no choice but to stroke the tiny velvety head of her loopy lover. 


	12. Revelations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Slade stirs the pot.

The dual orange and black mask stared from the den’s television screen with all of the controlled venom that was Slade’s forte.

Robin spoke through gritted teeth : “Slade, what do you want?”

“It’s not what I want, Robin.” An orange gauntlet rose into the picture, pointed an index finger directly at Raven who sat on the sectional couch with her boyfriend. 

“It’s what _she_ wants.”

Robin’s scowl lightened. 

“She wants what we all want : you to go away.”

Behind him, Raven and Beast Boy tried to look innocent. Neither succeeded: his tail was between his legs and he wasn't even in dog form ; she sat just a little too straight for both the furniture and the fact that if was smooched any closer to Garfield, she'd be in his lap. Cyborg was too busy vocally agreeing with Robin to notice the guilty couple, but Starfire was not. Seated on the couch on the other side of her best friend, she caught the full display of quivering remorse. 

She thought, ‘She is keeping secrets from me, her Glor’som?’ Her eyes widened before narrowing. ‘The reason better be…’ She was interrupted by Slade.

Slade's eye narrowed, he slowly raised his finger and waggled it at Robin. "Your team's keeping you in the dark, Rob..." 

Robin switched off the screen ; turned to his compatriots, a vexed look clouding his masked face. 

Beast Boy squealed, turned into a bat ; attempted to flit from the room ; was bubbled and ‘ported back to his couch perch by his significant other. Perky ears drooped, fruit bat Beast Boy looked resigned before turning back into an equally droopy and resigned looking teenager. 

Raven put an arm about her beau, cleared her throat nervously ; launched into laconic goth explanation mode:

“ Azarath survived Trigon.”

Robin’s eyebrows shot up above his mask ; Starfire, looking uncharacteristically stern, moved to her man’s side ; Cyborg wore his patented yet patient ‘Of course magic doesn’t have to make sense’ look. 

Eyebrows parked back behind the his domino mask, Robin asserted, “We saw that dimension destroyed.”

Gar, shot a confused look at his girlfriend, burst in with a rushed, “Dude, Raven’s mom moved it to another dimension!”

At the mention of Arella, Starfire’s entire mien altered ; her eyes widened with their usual happy lustre, and she drifted ten centimetres off of the floor.

“Your mother’s alive : that is wonderful!” Then the lustre dimmed slightly ; the ten centimetres became five.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” 

Cyborg considered his team mates with an empathetic eye and a cold sensor : “They found out when they stared getting serious.”

Robin looked “So?”

Cyborg gave him a long look. 

“You only tell some things to loved ones : didn’t you learn that from Star?”

“My Space Viking six hundred stanzas of happiness poem spouting girlfriend?”

The aforementioned female punched him in the shoulder with exactly just enough verve to playfully inform him that the Space Viking designation was almost precise. 

“Robin, please, I am not that bad, am I?”

He rubbed his shoulder, reflected upon the literary side of his Batman training regime : “You’re my Beowulf!”

Not understanding exactly, she hugged him happily. ‘And my Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid’ he mouthed at the rest of the team : Cyborg grinned at the joke ; Raven’s mouth quirked into something dangerously close to a smile; Beast Boy had zero clue. 

“Anyway, that’s great news” Gar looked less droopy, and Raven managed a quiet twinkle. Robin continued, ”I’ll have to send Slade a 'Thank You!' card for informing us.”

The couch bound couple’s expressions shifted back towards the uncomfortable end of the social spectrum. 

****

In his latest lair, Slade chuckled ; the laugh echoed amusingly about the be-cogged murk of the warehouse. Teenagers remained teenagers no matter the epoch. He remembered his own youth, so long ago, in Ithica before the rigours of kingship and the martial demands of Agamemnon. However, that was the past ; he had a future to look to, and subjects of his own to discipline. And he had an old acquaintance, a lover of long ago, who would know the location of the artefact that would allow him to set the most powerful member of the Teen Titans on her proper course. It would be good to see Circe again.


	13. Latin it up!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally together, the team seeks the location of the Venit Sphaeram which will hopefully disclose the new dimensional location of the surviving portion of Azarath.

Gar’s voice bounced eerily about the cobwebbed and shadowed expanse of ruined chamber as he tortuously read the line Raven ran her pale finger along in the time weathered tome. 

“Breve autem in carne una adhuc arcanum est, multis locis: ex bibliotheca et in mente.*” 

Raven considered her man with a level gaze : “And that means?”

“The…animal skin-Gross!—books the Arcanum…are…I must be reading it wrong : “How can it be one place and many?”

Raven’s expression didn’t waver as she popped a kiss across the surprised Beast Boy’s lips.

“You read it right.” She picked up where he left off on the translation : “… _ex bibliotheca et in mente_ : “a library of and for the mind.”

Gar went crosseyed : “But what does that even mean?” 

“It might be as simple as a cross dimensional place of learning.”

Gar laughed : “Only you’d say that was simple!”

Starfire, running her fingertips along the bindings of the ancient library’s shelved books, perked up : “Or it is a place that stays with you as _really_ as the place itself.”

That made Raven’s eyes widen : “A mind link like a library membership?”

Robin dropped into a crouch from out of the shadow shaded heights of the ceiling. Gar startled, fell backwards off the low dais supporting the podium which held the book he had been reading from. 

“Dude, stop Slading around!”

Robin shot a glare at Gar. “I think ‘written in flesh’ & ‘of and for the mind’ means it’s more likely a fancy way of saying that there’s a society of librarians…”

Raven nodded : “Which means that there’d be a central meeting site for a collection that may only exist within the collective memory of a troop of… “

Gar leapt back onto the dais with a Bruce Lee yell and a ridiculous kung fu pose : “Book ninja!” 

Raven was about to cuff her boyfriend’s mussed hairdo, shrugged ; adopted her own martial arts posture. “Definitely book ninja!”

Robin considered Raven with a frown : “You’re supposed to be rubbing off on him, not the other way around!”

Giggling, Starfire floated over from her eavesdropping only slightly disguised as book spine reading to cuddle up against her _skor’nook_ ** : “I think they are rubbing off on each other, Robin!”

“Poor choice of words.” Blushing as red as any robin, Dick continued, “I was hoping for a little less goofball Gar.”

Beast Boy butted in with a grinning, “Gratias amica mea, ego non iocari latine!***” 

Robin face palmed. “Do I even want to know?”

Peeking out from behind a stack of dusty books, Cyborg, straight-faced, reported, “My translation protocols inform me that it means, ‘ Bah weep gragnah weep nini bong!’^ 

Everyone glared at Cyborg, albeit everyone but Robin’s were amused. Cyborg hid behind his tomb of tomes. 

Raven decided to deescalate the skirmish of the sillies with, “If the location of the Venit Sphaeram is anywhere, it will be in the collection of the Arcanum.”

Robin finally had some semblance of sense on which to act. He struck that pose that the others thought of as Batman’s in the Room, declared, “We’ll find it, Raven : together!” 

***************

Latin : Writ in the flesh the Arcanum is one yet many places : a library of and for the mind.

translation site: http://www.stars21.com/translator/english_to_latin.html

**Skor’nook : Tamaranean: (noun) Sweetheart, darling, sugar, squeeze, boo

***Latin : Thanks to my girlfriend, I can joke in latin!

^The Universal greeting from Transformers : The Movie (1986)


	14. A Study in Infinity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enter bookish Zatanna. More to come.

“I wear pants now, creep! _See_!” Zatanna Zatara made a dramatic two handed gesture at the portion of her anatomy that lay beneath the belt ; it was fully clad in a denim that wasn’t even body hugging. "Only sad fanboys draw me in that old _Vegas showgirl_ outfit!"

One of the pair of the spoken too, what Zatanna had come to think of as her _fan_ emy base, turned to the other scraggly twenty something dude, and contemptuously said, “You're _lame_ now Zatanna : the old you had no problem strutt'n it for her fans!"

“Yeah, and I betcha' magic's all dried up, too!”

The jet-black tressed woman smiled winningly, “Uoy Kcus ta Oediv Arclumis!” 

She wheeled about on her comfortable flats, sashayed into the a brownstone that was no more less or more interesting on the outside than all of the other brownstones Park Slope neighbourhood. She ignored the final rude catcalls of the duo before, loosing interest, they slinked away into the afternoon nip of Brooklyn in October. 

As she crossed the threshold, Zatanna entered not just one residence, but a multitude of ten thousand of which only one was real : it was this one, the _Studium_ , that was the real address. Everything else was defensive obfuscation, paths which led, according to the threat posed by the seeker, to either being merely ejected from the premises or imprisoned deep within the multi dimensional aether...or worse.

She passed through the flashy, iridescence of the portal hidden within the doorjamb of a building that was nothing but facade ; stepped into a vast fractal expanse of slight variances of the almost exact same stately Victorian study each housing various percentages of their home dimension’s ten members, the _Libri Decem_. Over this galactic spiral of studies, a closed book the size of the moon spun slowly on the tilted axis of its vast spine. The title and surface ornamentation of the tome flowed and changed from title to title with a hypnotic flow of mercury. 

Inured enough to the incredible setting, Zatanna nodded to the nine seated members of the _Libri Decem_ as she shucked her well worn leather bomber jacket--uncovering a 'Witchy Woman' t-shirt--threw it over the back of the extra overstuffed red Moroccan leather chair. 

The tenth one, standing at a sidebar, mixing drinks, nodded back: "Hey, babe!"

Somehow resplendent in his rumpled suit and stained Burberry, John Constantine presented his sometimes girlfriend with her favourite drink, a Vesper martini. She accepted the chilled goblet with an exasperated eye-roll.

“Not now, John! I just got it from a _fan_ emy duo outside.”

Constantine's grin faded to what he wanted to be an empathetic smile, but it twisted into a sarky sickle in the midst of his perpetual six o'clock shadow. It didn't matter : Zatanna _knew_ Constantine.

The golden helmet added a metallic ring to the otherwise quiet voice of the seated Dr. Fate.

What is this _Fanemy_ : is it a threat to the Arcanum?"

The sometimes couple turned laughingly to face the nearly featureless curved hat that made Zatanna think gold headed dildos. It fit Fate : he _really_ was a self righteous prick.

Constantine bowed at the lady necromancer, "Milady's fans have exactly two talents : they can spot her instantly regardless of her dress, and..."

"...They all treat me like a steak in fishnets! I tell you, John, it's a curse, a _literal_ curse!"

"It would be best for a member of the Arcanum not to have such..."

The other seven _Libri Decem_ hid expressions of amusement with varying degrees of success.

" _Fan _emies. "__

This was from the petite, seemingly Japanese teenager who held a rainbow fingernail painted hand decorously in front of her little grin.

Zatanna thought, Get stuffed, Goldie! but, instead, actually said, "We're not here to talk about me." She added to herself : I hope to _Ultima Magus_! She cast her best no nonsense look at her mystic co-workers.

John Constantine poured himself a tumbler of a one hundred year old single malt with so many Scots burrs in the name that even the distiller had a hard time pronouncing it while sober.

“Odysseus has found the _Venit Sphaeram."_

Zatanna shot her drink back : “Hoo boy!”

Dr. Fate drew his two golden gauntlets pompously together into an interlaced fingered clutch. 

“Yes, he now possesses the trans-celestial coordinates of _all_ twelve Caeleste Fragmenta!”*

The newest member of the _Libri Decem_ , Traci Thirteen, was the only one not to nod gloomily at Fate.

Thirteen leant forward in her chair, her elbows resting on the whole lot of thigh her short plaid skirt revealed. “The…” She furrowed her brow in concentration, “…Remnants of Heaven? What’re those?” 

Toying with her empty glass, Zatanna replied, “They’re the hidden ruins of…” She frowned at Fate, “ _eleven_ mystical realms destroyed by contact with the Prime Mortal Plane.”

Dr. Fate portentously repeated, “Twelve : a final realm has fallen.”

“Then the prophecy…” 

Constantine handed her another martini.

“Is fulfilled, but,” His pale blue eyes regarded her from over the rim of his scotch glass. “we don’t know _which_ realm because…” 

“You can’t figure it all out ; _that’s_ why I’m here.”

Constantine grinned at his cadre : “I make it a point not to date _witless_ women!”

Zatanna rolled her eyes, took a sip of her martini.

“Keep that up and I’ll go lesbian on you.”

“Then who will I date?”

Dr. Fate conveyed distaste at this playful interchange through his crossed armed body language ; keyed in on the chemistry between the older couple, Traci Thirteen tittered.

“Now kiss!” 

Suitably amused by the teenager, Zatanna tossed her drink ; swept John Constantine up into a passionate smooch. As she was taller, he had to tiptoe ; for comic effect, he kicked his right brogue back in the feminine kiss-cliché.

Thirteen hoorayed ; the others looked on with various degrees of stoicism and amusement ; Fate glowered. 

Zatanna broke the kiss with a breathy little gasp. 

“Lay it on me, man!”

John composed himself, theatrically smoothing his blonde hair back with his hands ; declared in his plummiest theatre voice, “When the soul menagerie unites with the wing swept night, the twelfth pillar will crumble ; the power for boon or bane will be encompassed within the Sphere of mortal substance.”

Clarity burst across Zatanna’s mind : “ _Azarath!_ ”

Constantine kissed her back : “Of course! It's not _soul_ menagerie : it's _sole_ menagerie!

The others looked confused.

“Beast Boy is the menagerie in one! He’s all the animals in one!”

Zatanna nodded : “And then it’s easy!”

John threw his tumbler dramatically into the hearth, the scotch igniting a gout of flame. “His little Hell princess!”

“And Azarath!”

His dark blue cape flowing around the back of his chair, Grey Walker raised a white gloved index finger.

"But Azarath survived."

Fate nodded his helmet, "As did we all, thanks to the Teen Titans."

Arms akimbo, Zatanna realized as she looked at the amassed magical knowledge in that infinitely recurring study that they really were too close to their subject matter to be able to see much of anything at all.

"That's the dangerous part of the prophecy : nothing is ever _truly_ destroyed."

Constantine, understanding, took up her line of thought.

"Fragments exist of all the fallen realms : Avalon, Olympus, Faerie, Jejune, Myrra, Azarath, and all of the rest. Fragments containing items of myth, artefacts of epics."

Zatanna finished it. "And now the man who brought Troy down with _the_ wooden horse has the key for Excalibur, the Aegis, Hearn's torc** and Zeus knows what else! See the problem now?"

Thirteen yawned, "Who is this Odysseus, anyway?"

Zatanna fixed the teen with a grim little smile.

"Just a little guy you know as _Slade_."

That got Traci's attention. She hugged her knees, her eyes wide in fear. "Fuck, I _hate_ that chill shit !"

********

* Caeleste Fragmenta: Latin : Fragments of Celestial Existence

**The torc allows the user to call forth the Wild Hunt, a spectral hunting party which catches the local mortal population up in hunting the prey designated by the wearer of the torc.


End file.
